Thank you to everyone who joined us for this session!

For this session we read a poem “Famous” by Naomi Shihab Nye, posted below.

Our prompt was: “The idea I carry close to my bosom.”

More details will be posted on this session, so check back again!

Participants are warmly encouraged to share what you wrote below (“Leave a Reply”), to keep the conversation going here, bearing in mind that the blog of course is a public space where confidentiality is not assured.

Also, we would love to learn more about your experience of these sessions, so if you’re able, please take the time to fill out a follow-up survey of one to two quick questions!

Please join us for our next session Friday November 15th at 12pm EST, with more times listed on our Live Virtual Group Sessions.

Famous by Naomi Shihab Nye

The river is famous to the fish.

The loud voice is famous to silence,   
which knew it would inherit the earth   
before anybody said so.   

The cat sleeping on the fence is famous to the birds   
watching him from the birdhouse.   

The tear is famous, briefly, to the cheek.   

The idea you carry close to your bosom   
is famous to your bosom.   

The boot is famous to the earth,   
more famous than the dress shoe,   
which is famous only to floors.

The bent photograph is famous to the one who carries it   
and not at all famous to the one who is pictured.   

I want to be famous to shuffling men   
who smile while crossing streets,   
sticky children in grocery lines,   
famous as the one who smiled back.

I want to be famous in the way a pulley is famous,   
or a buttonhole, not because it did anything spectacular,   
but because it never forgot what it could do.

Copyright Credit: Naomi  Shihab Nye
Source: Words Under the Words: Selected Poems (Far Corner Books, 1995)

Thank you to everyone who joined us for this session!

For this session we read a poem “Two Guitars” by Victor Hernández Cruz, posted below.

Our prompt was: “Write about what happens when the door opens OR Write about a tune the guitars play.

More details will be posted on this session, so check back again!

Participants are warmly encouraged to share what you wrote below (“Leave a Reply”), to keep the conversation going here, bearing in mind that the blog of course is a public space where confidentiality is not assured.

Also, we would love to learn more about your experience of these sessions, so if you’re able, please take the time to fill out a follow-up survey of one to two quick questions!

Please join us for our next session Friday November 8th at 12pm EST, with more times listed on our Live Virtual Group Sessions.

Two Guitars by Victor Hernández Cruz

Two Guitars
BY VICTOR HERNÁNDEZ CRUZ
Two guitars were left in a room all alone
They sat on different corners of the parlor
In this solitude they started talking to each other
My strings are tight and full of tears
The man who plays me has no heart
I have seen it leave out of his mouth
I have seen it melt out of his eyes
It dives into the pores of the earth
When they squeeze me tight I bring
Down the angels who live off the chorus
The trios singing loosen organs
With melodious screwdrivers
Sentiment comes off the hinges
Because a song is a mountain put into
Words and landscape is the feeling that
Enters something so big in the harmony
We are always in danger of blowing up
With passion
The other guitar:
In 1944 New York
When the Trio Los Panchos started
With Mexican & Puerto Rican birds
I am the one that one of them held
Tight    like a woman
Their throats gardenia gardens
An airport for dreams
I've been in theaters and cabarets
I played in an apartment on 102nd street
After a baptism pregnant with women
The men flirted and were offered
Chicken soup
Echoes came out of hallways as if from caves
Someone is opening the door now
The two guitars hushed and there was a
Resonance in the air like what is left by
The last chord of a bolero.

Source: Maraca: New and Selected Poems 1965-2000 (Coffee House Press, 2001

Rita Basuray blog post

Thank you to everyone who joined us for this session!

For this session we read an excerpt from the novel Exit West by Mohsin Hamid (pg. 139), posted below.

Our prompt was: “Write about what we are born of.”

Participants are warmly encouraged to share what you wrote below (“Leave a Reply”), to keep the conversation going here, bearing in mind that the blog of course is a public space where confidentiality is not assured.

Also, we would love to learn more about your experience of these sessions, so if you’re able, please take the time to fill out a follow-up survey of one to two quick questions!

Please join us for our next session Monday October 28th at 6pm EDT, with more times listed on our Live Virtual Group Sessions.

Excerpt (p 139) from Exit West by Mohsin Hamid (2017)

“The cherry trees exploded on Palace Gardens Terrace  at that time, bursting into white blossoms, the closest thing many of the street’s residents had ever seen to snow, and reminding others of ripe cotton in the fields, waiting to be picked, waiting for labor, for the efforts of dark bodies from the villages, and in these trees there were now dark bodies too, children who climbed and played among the boughs, like little monkeys, not because to be dark is to be monkey-like, though that has been and was being and will long be slurred, but because people are monkeys who have forgotten that they are monkeys, and so have lost respect for what they are born of, for the natural world around them, but not, just then, these children, who were thrilled in nature, playing imaginary games, lost in the clouds of white like balloonists or pilots or phoenixes or dragons, and as bloodshed loomed they made of these trees that were perhaps not intended to be climbed the stuff of a thousand fantasies.”

Thank you to everyone who joined us for this session!

For this session we took a close look at the piece titled “Disability” by Allessandro Gatto, posted below.

Our prompt was: “Write about a space.”

More details will be posted on this session, so check back again!

Participants are warmly encouraged to share what you wrote below (“Leave a Reply”), to keep the conversation going here, bearing in mind that the blog of course is a public space where confidentiality is not assured.

Also, we would love to learn more about your experience of these sessions, so if you’re able, please take the time to fill out a follow-up survey of one to two quick questions!

Please join us for our next session Friday October 25th at 12pm EDT, with more times listed on our Live Virtual Group Sessions.

“Disability” by Allessandro Gatto

Credit: Allessandro Gatto

Thank you to everyone who joined us for this session!

For this session we read a poem “From Blossoms” by Li-Young Lee, posted below.

Our prompt was: “Write about finding joy from day to day to day.”

More details will be posted on this session, so check back again!

Participants are warmly encouraged to share what you wrote below (“Leave a Reply”), to keep the conversation going here, bearing in mind that the blog of course is a public space where confidentiality is not assured.

Also, we would love to learn more about your experience of these sessions, so if you’re able, please take the time to fill out a follow-up survey of one to two quick questions!

Please join us for our next session Monday October 14th at 6pm EDT, with more times listed on our Live Virtual Group Sessions.

From Blossoms by Li-Young Lee

From blossoms comes
this brown paper bag of peaches
we bought from the boy
at the bend in the road where we turned toward   
signs painted Peaches.

From laden boughs, from hands,
from sweet fellowship in the bins,
comes nectar at the roadside, succulent
peaches we devour, dusty skin and all,
comes the familiar dust of summer, dust we eat.

O, to take what we love inside,
to carry within us an orchard, to eat
not only the skin, but the shade,
not only the sugar, but the days, to hold
the fruit in our hands, adore it, then bite into   
the round jubilance of peach.

There are days we live
as if death were nowhere
in the background; from joy
to joy to joy, from wing to wing,
from blossom to blossom to
impossible blossom, to sweet impossible blossom.

Credit: Li-Young Lee, “From Blossoms” from Rose. 

Thank you to everyone who joined us for this session!

For this session we read a poem “Great Things Have Happened” by Alden Nowlan, posted below.

Our prompt was: “Write your first thoughts in the shadow of this poem.”

More details will be posted on this session, so check back again!

Participants are warmly encouraged to share what you wrote below (“Leave a Reply”), to keep the conversation going here, bearing in mind that the blog of course is a public space where confidentiality is not assured.

Also, we would love to learn more about your experience of these sessions, so if you’re able, please take the time to fill out a follow-up survey of one to two quick questions!

Please join us for our next session Friday October 11th at 12pm EDT, with more times listed on our Live Virtual Group Sessions.

Great Things Have Happened by Alden Nowlan

We were talking about the great things
that have happened in our lifetimes;
and I said, "Oh, I suppose the moon landing
was the greatest thing that has happened
in my time." But, of course, we were all lying.
The truth is the moon landing didn't mean
one-tenth as much to me as one night in 1963
when we lived in a three-room flat in what once had been
the mansion of some Victorian merchant prince
(our kitchen had been a clothes closet, I'm sure),
on a street where by now nobody lived
who could afford to live anywhere else.
That night, the three of us, Claudine, Johnnie and me,
woke up at half-past four in the morning
and ate cinnamon toast together.

"Is that all?" I hear somebody ask.

Oh, but we were silly with sleepiness
and, under our windows, the street-cleaners
were working their machines and conversing in Italian, and
everything was strange without being threatening,
even the tea-kettle whistled differently
than in the daytime: it was like the feeling
you get sometimes in a country you've never visited
before, when the bread doesn't taste quite the same,
the butter is a small adventure, and they put
paprika on the table instead of pepper,
except that there was nobody in this country
except the three of us, half-tipsy with the wonder
of being alive, and wholly enveloped in love.

"Great Things Have Happened" by Alden Nowlan, from What Happened When He Went to the Store for Bread. © Nineties Press, 1993. Reprinted with permission

Thank you to everyone who joined us for this session!

For this session we read a poem “For What Binds Us” by Jane Hirshfield, posted below.

Our prompt was: “Write about a small triumph.”

More details will be posted on this session, so check back again!

Participants are warmly encouraged to share what you wrote below (“Leave a Reply”), to keep the conversation going here, bearing in mind that the blog of course is a public space where confidentiality is not assured.

Also, we would love to learn more about your experience of these sessions, so if you’re able, please take the time to fill out a follow-up survey of one to two quick questions!

Please join us for our next session Monday September 30th at 6pm EDT, with more times listed on our Live Virtual Group Sessions.

For What Binds Us by Jane Hirshfield

There are names for what binds us:
strong forces, weak forces.
Look around, you can see them:
the skin that forms in a half-empty cup,
nails rusting into the places they join,
joints dovetailed on their own weight.
The way things stay so solidly
wherever they've been set down—
and gravity, scientists say, is weak.

And see how the flesh grows back
across a wound, with a great vehemence,
more strong
than the simple, untested surface before.
There's a name for it on horses,
when it comes back darker and raised: proud flesh,

as all flesh,
is proud of its wounds, wears them
as honors given out after battle,
small triumphs pinned to the chest—

And when two people have loved each other
see how it is like a
scar between their bodies,
stronger, darker, and proud;
how the black cord makes of them a single fabric
that nothing can tear or mend.

Copyright Credit: Jane Hirshfield, "For What Binds Us" from Of Gravity & Angels. Copyright © 1988 by Jane Hirshfield and reprinted by permission of Wesleyan University Press.
Source: Of Gravity & Angels (Wesleyan University Press, 1988)

Thank you to everyone who joined us for this session!

For this session we read a poem “Stripping and Putting On” by May Swenson, posted below.

Our prompt was: “Write about putting on light, like clothes.”

More details will be posted on this session, so check back again!

Participants are warmly encouraged to share what you wrote below (“Leave a Reply”), to keep the conversation going here, bearing in mind that the blog of course is a public space where confidentiality is not assured.

Also, we would love to learn more about your experience of these sessions, so if you’re able, please take the time to fill out a follow-up survey of one to two quick questions!

Please join us for our next session Friday September 27th at 12pm EDT, with more times listed on our Live Virtual Group Sessions.

Stripping and Putting On by May Swenson

I always felt like a bird blown through the world.
I never felt like a tree.

I never wanted a patch of this earth to stand in,
that would stick to me.

I wanted to move by whatever throb my muscles
sent to me.

I never cared for cars, that crawled on land or
air or sea.

If I rode, I'd rather another animal: horse, camel,
or shrewd donkey.

Never needed a nest, unless for the night, or when
winter overtook me.

Never wanted an extra skin between mine and the sun,
for vanity or modesty.

Would rather not have parents, had no yen for a child,
and never felt brotherly.

But I'd borrow or lend love of friend. Let friend be
not stronger or weaker than me.

Never hankered for Heaven, or shield from a Hell,
or played with the puppets Devil and Deity.

I never felt proud as one of the crowd under
the flag of a country.

Or felt that my genes were worth more or less than beans,
by accident of ancestry.

Never wished to buy or sell. I would just as well
not touch money.

Never wanted to own a thing that wasn't I born with.
Or to act by a fact not discovered by me.

I always felt like a bird blown through the world.
But I would like to lay

the egg of a world in a nest of calm beyond
this world's storm and decay.

I would like to own such wings as light speeds on,
far from this globule of night and day.

I would like to be able to put on, like clothes,
the bodies of all those

creatures and things hatched under the wings
of that world.

"Stripping and Putting On" by May Swenson, from Nature: Poems Old and New. © Houghton Mifflin Company, 2000. Reprinted with permission.

Thank you to everyone who joined us for this session!

For this session we took a close look at the piece “Attached to My Adhesion” by Eugenie Lee, posted below.

Our prompt was: “Write about a scar.”

More details will be posted on this session, so check back again!

Participants are warmly encouraged to share what you wrote below (“Leave a Reply”), to keep the conversation going here, bearing in mind that the blog of course is a public space where confidentiality is not assured.

Also, we would love to learn more about your experience of these sessions, so if you’re able, please take the time to fill out a follow-up survey of one to two quick questions!

Please join us for our next session Friday September 20th at 12pm EDT, with more times listed on our Live Virtual Group Sessions.

Attached to My Adhesion by Eugenie Lee

Credit: Eugenie Lee

Thank you to everyone who joined us for this session!

For this session we read a poem “Bone Appendix” by Julia Kolchinsky Dasbach, posted below.

Our prompt was: “Write a letter about growing pains to your child self.”

Participants are warmly encouraged to share what you wrote below (“Leave a Reply”), to keep the conversation going here, bearing in mind that the blog of course is a public space where confidentiality is not assured.

Also, we would love to learn more about your experience of these sessions, so if you’re able, please take the time to fill out a follow-up survey of one to two quick questions!

Please join us for our next session Friday September 13th at 12pm EDT, with more times listed on our Live Virtual Group Sessions.

Bone Appendix by Julia Kolchinsky Dasbach

After Alexandra Petrova

Trace your son’s left hand
           against construction paper
                     with a nontoxic marker,

           teaching him the edges
of his bones. Then fill
            the space between

                     with what shines
           or powders, glitter,
crushed cheerios, flecks

           of skin even, teaching him
                     his bones remain
           in spite of it. Let him try

to fit his fingers in the contours,
           teaching him his bones
                      keep growing. And when

           he makes two fists, afraid
his body can’t keep up
           with what’s inside, clenching

                      hard as teeth to keep his bones
           just as they are, to keep them
from sprouting out, tell him

           of  Ukraine’s oldest apple tree
                      that grows its branches
           low into the ground

until they drink the soil—
           an indiscernible colony
                      of roots or eternally new trees.

           And when he falls
asleep pressed to your chest,
           trace his right hand

                      against the tree-house
           rib cage it first grew, teaching him
the endlessness of bones.

Source: Poetry (December 2019)